I am not sure I understand the purpose of the flask.jsonify method. I try to make a JSON string from this:
data = {"id": str(album.id), "title": album.title}
but what I get with json.dumps differs from what I get with flask.jsonify.
json.dumps(data): [{"id": "4ea856fd6506ae0db42702dd", "title": "Business"}]
flask.jsonify(data): {"id":…, "title":…}
Obviously I need to get a result that looks more like what json.dumps returns. What am I doing wrong?
You can do:
flask.jsonify(**data)
or
flask.jsonify(id=str(album.id), title=album.title)
This is flask.jsonify()
def jsonify(*args, **kwargs):
if __debug__:
_assert_have_json()
return current_app.response_class(json.dumps(dict(*args, **kwargs),
indent=None if request.is_xhr else 2), mimetype='application/json')
The json module used is either simplejson or json in that order. current_app is a reference to the Flask() object i.e. your application. response_class() is a reference to the Response() class.
consider
data={'fld':'hello'}
now
jsonify(data)
will yield {'fld':'hello'} and
json.dumps(data)
gives
"<html><body><p>{'fld':'hello'}</p></body></html>"
The choice of one or another depends on what you intend to do. From what I do understand:
jsonify would be useful when you are building an API someone would query and expect json in return. E.g: The REST github API could use this method to answer your request.
dumps, is more about formating data/python object into json and work on it inside your application. For instance, I need to pass an object to my representation layer where some javascript will display graph. You'll feed javascript with the Json generated by dumps.
Source: Stackoverflow.com